RetroFed
The EU today launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI Gigafactories across Europe, as part of its latest major push to accelerate Europe's technological sovereignty.
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eickerhttps://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1708
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I just read someone complaining about the marketing term “AI gigafactory”, implying something of worth would be manufactured.
I share his critique.
Can’t use the term data center or people will freak out. It’s too divisive at this point.
Then let’s keep the conversation honest and still call it a data center or something computing related.
No reason to try to manipulate the perception.
Giga’s can be worth something
Instead of this hype, maybe the EU should focus on some basic tech first? Such as industry to manufacture basic household devices.
Some households would be nice, too
But what about the wildfires
That’s the neat part! Now we have all this free land for important stuff like generating bland waifu pics and none of those pesky tree huggers can do anything about it.
Can AWS or Microsoft or the like join consortia that apply?
This is a significant step for Europe’s AI ambitions. Access to large scale compute has become one of the biggest barriers to building competitive AI models. If executed well, these gigafactories could give European startups, researchers, and companies the infrastructure they need to innovate at home instead of relying almost entirely on US or Chinese providers.
Bullshit. Several European countries much have more data center capacities each than China (or anyone else but the US and their insane bubble burning trillions without any reasonable business model). Combined the EU is in a very good position.
(For reference: Germany has more than 500 data centers, France slightly less, the UK even a few more. The EU has more than 1500. Compared to ~300 in China… (also even less in India or Australia) with no one else even coming close. It’s really just the US that sticks out and a lot of their data centers are hallucinations where the usual suspects opened up massive installations and declared them operational, while most of it isn’t even build or just empty buildings.)
PS: And just because… https://isaiprofitable.com/
Where did you get the impression that Europe has more compute than China?
This analysis estimates that the US (75%) and China (14%) have much higher aggregate performance than Europe (listed as EU + Norway) at 5.6% (reference date: early 2025), in terms of 16-bit FLOP/s.
This projection lists 35GW of compute for the US and 5GW for China but only 2.3 GW for Europe for 2026.
It’s easy to underestimate how different these facilities are: Traditional data centres are built to run millions of separate workloads efficiently. AI data centres are engineered to make tens of thousands of GPUs act like one giant supercomputer. The building may look similar, but the power, cooling, networking and economics are almost an entirely different industry.
The market is fragmented across the Member States, each of which conducts its own research. That is precisely what needs to change. Hopefully, this approach will work.